Madam Speaker, Canadians have a right to be thoroughly cynical about this legislation. For all the public hype about how the Liberal government wants to encourage Canadians to participate in the electoral process, notwithstanding the Prime Minister's claims that he is taking action to prevent interference in our elections from hostile foreign governments, Bill C-65 should give little comfort to Canadians who feel that our mock democracy is eroding before our very eyes.
Living in Canada is like winning the lottery. We have a history of standing for justice. We are a country dedicated to the rule of law. We are prosperous. We are safe. We have been blessed with an embarrassing abundance of natural resources. Our citizens are among the best educated in the world. We boast a strong democratic system and a commitment to peaceful transitions of power.
Since 2006, I have had the honour of serving the constituents of Abbotsford, British Columbia, who have elected and re-elected me six times through a robust, fair and transparent electoral process. This very process is what Bill C-65 claims to improve upon.
Trust in our democratic institutions, in our elections, is critical to a peaceful and vibrant society. Canadians must have confidence that the members of the House, who are right here in this chamber, have been elected and have arrived here fairly, without interference from foreign powers. As such, there are some provisions in the bill that we Conservatives would agree with, but we are also deeply concerned that the provisions of the bill are an attempt to conceal from Canadians a much more cynical ploy, namely the promotion of the private financial interests of the Prime Minister's NDP-Liberal caucus, a group of MPs who expect not to be re-elected. I will get to that in a moment.
To be sure, there are provisions in the legislation that we support. To begin with, there are provisions that would make changes to third party donations. Those changes are welcome, particularly as they are aimed at preventing foreign entities from contributing to election-related activities in Canada.
With the recent revelations regarding interference in our democracy by hostile foreign actors, and the shocking disclosure that our Prime Minister failed to act in a timely manner to warn Canadian MPs and party candidates of threats to their own elections, we parliamentarians must act to ensure that our institutions remain secure and accountable to the only people who really matter, Canadians themselves, and not to hostile foreign powers. Ensuring that foreigners cannot easily donate to candidates for a federal election is a sensible, albeit very modest, improvement for a stronger democracy.
If that were the sole purpose of Bill C-65, we would be content. However, this modest improvement in our election laws is marred by other elements that are problematic. I speak, of course, of the Prime Minister's cynical efforts to extend the so-called fixed election date by one week.
A fixed election is exactly that, or it is supposed to be that, which is the setting of a fixed date for an election to take place in a predictable manner, instead of the Prime Minister gaming the system for his own partisan purposes. Sadly, the fixed election that the law prescribes is no more. Instead, the Prime Minister is cynically pushing it back. He is pushing back the fixed date to benefit his NDP-Liberal MPs who are facing imminent defeat in the next federal election.
According to the legislation, Canadians would have to pay more to pay for the pensions of MPs. Accordingly, this piece of legislation is now becoming known as the “loser NDP-Liberal pension protection act”. That is what it is.
I will explain for Canadians who have just tuned in. They deserve to know that, for MPs to qualify for a parliamentary pension, they must have served a total of six years in the House of Commons. It just so happens there were 80 MPs elected in 2019 who will not qualify for a pension if they lose the next election. They would fall one day short. The Prime Minister, of course, sensing that he and many of his NDP-Liberal coalition MPs will not survive politically, has cynically included in this legislation before us a provision that would extend the fixed election date by one week to secure the pension entitlements of NDP-Liberal MPs.
The Prime Minister claims this extension to the fixed election date has nothing at all to do with vesting in pensions for his MPs and everything to do with the Indian festival Diwali. That is a fair point, except that he had the option of moving the date one or two weeks earlier to avoid a conflict with Diwali, or of calling an election right now, as Conservatives have asked him to do. This would spare Diwali and avoid some of the corrosive cynicism that Canadians are experiencing today, but no, the Prime Minister has again exploited our long-suffering taxpayers by favouring the financial interests of elected officials who work here and, quite frankly, are well compensated for the work they do in the House.
We should remember that it is the Liberal government that has amassed more debt than all other Canadian governments in Canadian history combined. This is the Prime Minister who so glibly proclaimed that budgets balance themselves. This is the Prime Minister who asked Canadians to forgive him for not thinking about monetary policy. What are a few more taxpayer dollars going to pension off well-to-do and well-paid politicians? On that basis alone, Conservatives will vote against this legislation. We will always promote the interests of Canadian taxpayers. By the way, it is true that 32 of my Conservative colleagues are within that group of 80 MPs, but those Conservative MPs have made it very clear that they are prepared to go into an election right now and put our Conservative vision and plan for this country to the Canadian people against the disastrous Liberal record.
There are also other elements of the bill that are problematic. Under the legislation, taxpayers would have to foot the bill for having more advanced polling days, which is more cost to taxpayers. Conservatives are also concerned about new provisions that would place the political party above the candidate on a ballot. Let me again explain that. Elections determine who we wish to have represent us in Canada's Parliament, here in the House of Commons, and which individual would be our community's voice in Ottawa.
When Sir John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister, and the other fathers of Confederation came together to create the Dominion of Canada, they agreed that Canadians should elect a hard-working person from each of their communities to represent them in our capital city, someone dedicated to serving the interests of their communities and country without compromise. This would be an individual, not a political party, who truly cares for their district and the people within it. Sadly, this bill before us flips that time-honoured principle on its head by suddenly prioritizing the party on the ballot rather than the candidate himself or herself.
Rather than marking down the candidate of their choice on the ballot, Bill C-65 would now allow a voter to simply mark down the name of a political party, and that ballot would then be valid. This provision goes against everything our parliamentary democracy has been based on for over 150 years, the premise that elected members of the House serve Canadians and that we members, not our political parties or special interest groups, are employed by and accountable to Canadian voters.
It is beyond worrying that the NDP-Liberal coalition believes bringing American-style ballot box party politics into Canada, with its attendant ballot-harvesting abuses, will be embraced by Canadians. It will not, and it is not. More likely, it is our NDP-Liberal coalition friends who seek to gain an advantage over their political adversaries in the House.
I began my remarks by describing this bill as cynical, with a capital “C”. It is our Prime Minister who, over a period of nine long years, has failed to seriously address the integrity of our elections and the interference from hostile foreign actors. For many years, the Canadian government has known of foreign interference in our elections. In fact, the director of CSIS, which is our security and intelligence apparatus, warned our Prime Minister that there was a legitimate and significant threat, particularly from China, with respect to our democratic institutions and the elections that undergird those institutions.
Time and time again, the Prime Minister refused to act. It does not stop there. In July 2021, a CSIS report said that China views Canada as a high-priority target and invests substantially into influencing our elections and civil society. Indeed, my hon. colleague and friend, the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, has said that he and his extended family were even targets of the Communist regime in Beijing and that the Liberal government failed to let them know, to inform them of that fact.
More egregiously, the recent top secret NSICOP report on foreign interference names MPs who have wittingly or unwittingly engaged in election interference. That report, sadly, has been censored by our own Prime Minister, who refuses to let Canadians know who among us is suspected of acting on behalf of a foreign government. It is completely unacceptable that a parliamentarian who has wittingly aided a hostile foreign power should have their name protected and be able to run for re-election. That is incomprehensible, and Canadians deserve better.
Ask Canadians whether they believe someone suspected of disloyalty to our country who is in thrall to a foreign power should remain anonymous. The overwhelming response would be absolutely no, so it is fair to ask what the Prime Minister is hiding.
Accordingly, it should surprise nobody that Canadians are losing confidence in their electoral process and have grown cynical about anything the Liberal government does or says, and yet our Prime Minister continues to claim that only he and he alone can fix his own mess and the many other things that are broken in Canada. At its very essence, this boils down to an issue of trust. Do Canadians trust the Prime Minister? Do they trust the government? Overwhelmingly, the answer to that is no.
Our Liberal Prime Minister and his NDP-Liberal coalition have failed Canadians so badly that we cannot even trust our electoral process. This broken country needs a fix that only a change in government can deliver. The winds of change, fortunately, are sweeping across Canada, fanned by our Prime Minister's broken promises and his reckless disregard for the institutions of our democracy.
This bill in no way fixes that. Trust has been broken, and this bill before us will do nothing to materially fix that. For all of those reasons, and many more, I will not be supporting this bill, and I do not believe any of the Conservatives in the House will be supporting this bill.
I ask again: Do Canadians have a right to feel cynical? That is what I asked at the beginning of my speech. Do they have a right to feel cynical about their government? The answer is yes. They have a right to feel cynical about their government, about their Prime Minister, and yes, about this disingenuous bill.
The good news is that help and hope are on their way. Let us remember what things were like in Canada back in 2015, before the NDP-Liberal coalition broke everything. It messed it all up. Remember, we had low inflation. We had low interest rates. We had affordable homes and affordable food. We had safe streets. We had respect on the international stage. We had balanced budgets. We all had hope for a brighter and better future.
I am confident that a new government, a Conservative government, will restore the Canadian dream and the hope of a brighter future. We will axe the taxes, build the homes, stop the crime and fix the budget. Canadians are counting on us.
